Expert's Rating

OVERALL

BUILD QUALITY

FEATURES

VALUE FOR MONEY

PERFORMANCE

Price when reviewed

£350 inc VAT

ViewSonic’s 27in VP2765-LED is a professional-grade monitor, yet it’s available at a significantly lower price than most such displays. It looms over the sub-24in competition, but offers the same 1920x1080 resolution. We’d want 2560x1440 pixels on a display this size, even at this price. See also: Group test: what's the best display?

ViewSonic includes VGA, DVI and DisplayPort inputs, while HDMI devices can be attached using an HDMI-to-DVI cable. No speakers or audio outputs are built in, although there are four USB ports.

We were pleased to find hardware rather than touch-sensitive menu buttons, even if their black labels are almost invisible against the display’s black bezel. But we found it all too easy to mistake the power button for one of the ViewSonic’s configuration options.

Options here are rather basic: colour settings are limited to sRGB, four colour temperature presets and individual colour sliders. Unusually, there are no image presets, so you can’t quickly switch between different modes depending on the task at hand.

We were dazzled by the AMVA panel’s amazing brightness, measured at 378cd/m2. The black level of 0.31cd/m2 is reasonable, and resulted in a contrast ratio of 1,200:1 – slightly down on that of other AMVA monitors we’ve seen.

Neither were the ViewSonic’s viewing angles as good as we’d hoped. They’re by no means awful, but colours shift towards the corners of the screen as you focus on its centre. They are reasonably accurate, however. We measured 90 percent of the sRGB gamut, but just 61 percent of NTSC.

Gamers beware: a very slow response time of 25ms makes this display unsuitable for fast-paced action titles.

Power consumption is comparatively high, at 39W maximum brightness and 21W 120cd/m2.